The Abraham Cowley Text and Image Archive

Public Trust Bearing Fruit

Under subsequent rulers, coins with this same reverse sometimes bore an alternative legend describing the figure at center as Bonus Eventus, "Good Yield"; other issues routinely
presented Spes (Hope) with her signature icon, a flower. As in Cato the Elder's induction to his Art of Farming (De Re Rustica 1.1.4-7), success clearly involved fostering both "flowers" and "yields," furthering promise as well as performance, whatever mishaps and checks might intervene; thus one rarer depiction of Saturn's wife Ops or "Abundance" centers her very throne on a flower. Such connections may also begin to explain the odd tale in Ovid's Fasti 5.255 of how Juno conceived war-god Mars with the help of a flower; the story yields a coin-type of its own and inspires a brief passage in Cowley's Plantarum (5.585-91).